Something Sweet
by Hillside Dancing On
Summary: Some cling to the memory of time spent growing up. Crona doesn't dare forget. Ficlets.
1. 3

**Title**: Something Sweet  
**Fandom**: Soul Eater  
**Rating**: For violence, language, and the magical mystery tour of child abuse that is life with Medusa.  
**Canon:** Anime-verse.  
**Spoilers:** For episode 26 onward.  
**Disclaimer**: Soul Eater is Atsushi Ohkubo's property. I own nothing.

**A/N: **It gladdens my soul to the depth of my delete key when people _politely_ _insist_ that Crona is a girl. Nobody knows. Please don't pretend to.

* * *

_When did the tiger's young ones teach the dam?  
O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee;  
The milk thou suck'dst from her did turn to marble;  
Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny. ~Titus Andronicus - Act 2, scene 3. _

_

* * *

_

It is said that the earliest recollections begin at the age of three, with exceptions. But Crona has seldom been the exception, and his first tangible memory is of Medusa's first kindness towards him.

He distinctly remembers the cup she brought him, the fragrant steam that curled up from the hot, creamy milk, the thin syrup mixed through to make it all the sweeter and color it the faintest shade of lavender. He remembers giggling at the way this made it match his own hair; Medusa had smiled and pulled him onto her lap, running her hard fingers through the bright strands.

"It's your color, because this treat is just for you. So drink it all up."

And he had needed no second bidding. As he sat there sipping the milk from the cup she allowed him to hold on his own, he listened to her talk about what a good boy he was, how proud he was going to make her, and how he was going to grow up so big and strong. The warmth that had formed in the pit of his abdomen was like a single spot of light, grew and grew until he had no way of knowing if it was the hot drink or the sweetness of her voice, which no colorful syrup could hope to match.

The next thing Crona knew, he was waking up alone. Screaming, screaming as his veins seared and stretched with an agony his toddler's psyche could not comprehend.

Alone, and yet not alone.

That was the day he met Ragnarok.


	2. 4

_4_

* * *

While other children are making mistakes and delighting in each rough edge they discover in their own abilities, Medusa is harshly smoothing out the rough edges in Crona. While other children are blossoming slowly, scribbling out their names on new sheets of paper and learning to count to twenty, Crona is reading, writing, and practicing swordsmanship with small sticks, preparing for the day he becomes strong enough to wield Ragnarok.

His pronunciation is nearly flawless, since Medusa despises baby talk. And then, once he learns how to speak clearly, she teaches him when to shut up. He learns to walk with his back straight and his head down, to be hungry, to be cold. He learns to hold the mice she gives him, the white rabbits, the kittens and puppies that push at his hands and tickle his throat with their whiskers, to fight back tears when it comes time to pass them over to Ragnarok and listen as he breaks their necks.

All of these Medusa pushes into him, lessons to be ingrained into every breath.

The ability to follow, however, he learns on his own.

Without ever being instructed, he works out just the right distance to walk behind her; not too far that she turns and snaps to stop dragging his feet, not too close that she places a vector plate underneath his soles and sends him flying back...always trailing five steps behind, enough space to let her forget him, should she wish.

One day, she stops mid-stride to spare a glance over her shoulder, smirking at the way he freezes in his tracks. "You're such an obedient child, Crona. I'm pleased with you."

Lowering his gaze to hide the shining in his eyes, he kneads childish handfuls of his dress and quietly thanks her.

As she fills the entirety of his vision, this becomes his reason for being. He needs no other.


	3. 5

_5_

_

* * *

_

"Thank you, mother."

Instantly, he knows he has done wrong. The moment the words pass his lips, hanging in the sudden silence between them, he knows that it's not a matter of if, but how she will punish him.

Calmly, she takes back the plate of food she'd been mere seconds from handing him, which is painful enough in itself in the light of the last three meals Ragnarok has devoured from beneath his very nose.

He manages to stutter out half of an apology before her hand is around the back of his neck.

A great surge, a jolt, a flash of toxic light jumps from her palm into his body, finding its way instantaneously to his veins. Suddenly, the very blood in its system begins to writhe like a living thing being tortured with a red-hot bodkin, pushing at the arteries and tiny capillaries in a violent search for escape. When his vision fades to dark and the pain does not, an instinctual fear for the eyes flares to life, driving him to grope desperately at his face.

His head fills with the sound of someone howling, an inhuman, dying cry, but he can't be sure if it comes from Ragnarok or himself.

The day they met. Medusa's knee, lavender, _mother, it isn't stopping..._

But everything eventually does, even when it seems to encompass an eternity.

Medusa stands over him with arms folded judiciously, staring down. So unimpressed as she speaks over his piteous whimpering. "From now on, I'll only resort to this punishment if you use that word. Are we understood?" He summons just enough strength to nod. She frowns. "I_ asked_ you, are we understood?"

His throat catches on his own affirmative. "Y-yes ma'm, la...Lady Medusa!"

"Good." She gives him back the plate, food growing cold, and lets it clatter on the floor near him. "Now eat your dinner."


	4. 6

6

* * *

After a brief lifetime of looming threat, it's gone. Nothing remains of the Little One but the smell of sulfur and dark stain on the flooring that will rinse shining clean in a way Crona's memory of the day never will, and Medusa washes his hair.

Cross-legged in the soothing, blistering bath, he keeps his head down as she tips cup after cup over his scalp. The dragon's blood has caked on hard, forming a leaden crust that resists every soap and scrub and attempt to excise it. Every now and then she issues a mild command – stand up, close your eyes, let me see your foot, now the other one – but Crona hasn't uttered a single word since being turned loose on his opponent.

And when he finally does, his voice is all but faint enough to be lost in the slosh of water.

"Are you going to cut my hair off?"

Medusa gives an affectionate chuckle, amused, the kind that stands poised to deny the slightest accusation of wrongdoing. "No, I'm not going to cut your hair off."

"Oh."

Another cupful to rinse. The water has begun to tint with a brackish reddish-brown, like a bucket of rain left out in the autumn.

"Do I have to go back to the dark room?"

Medusa tips his chin upwards, scrubbing a faint smudge beneath his left eye. "Only weak children need to be locked out of sight. You've decided to be strong, haven't you, Crona?"

The washcloth pushes at his cheek, forcing him to squint, to see her through a world half blurred. There is approval in her words...and that, not this filthy bathwater, is what rinses him clean.

"Because red blood is weak," he whispers, "and mine is black."


	5. 7

_7_

_

* * *

_

Crona's curiosity is nearly suppressed by the time he turns seven years old. Some queries, however, are too recurring to fade from his mind, and he finally summons up the nerve to ask about his father.

"Don't ask such senseless questions," Medusa replies without looking at him, and if it were any other issue at all, that would be the end of it.

Five months go by before he even thinks of asking again, and another three before he tries one last time. This time, to his unimaginable surprise, Medusa gives him an answer.

"Well," she considers, head leaning on her fingers as she looks him up and down, surveying, until he wonders who it is she might be seeing. "We held a lot of the same ideals. The same goals."

She doesn't provide answers to questions he doesn't ask, and likely wouldn't even if he did. There's no reason he should know where it is this nameless person went, what he looked like or what his favorite food was, whether or not he was pleased to learn he would be a parent, and certainly not how hard he tried to pull the vector arrows from his ruined torso, squirming like an insect impaled on a roasting spit as he died, surrounded by the black blood he'd spent his life studying.

So Medusa doesn't tell him any of this. She simply smiles.

"You could say he was a lot like me."

Crona never asks again.


	6. 8

__

8

* * *

"Get up, Crona."

Crona doesn't, and wishes he could tell her that it's no matter of will; he simply _can't. _

Can't stand, can't lift his head, can't do a thing save huddle there on the bloody tiles and choke on his own tears. No one ever told him it would be different, that there was more than one way to die, or that people do it differently than mice and kittens and even dragons. The Little One hadn't offered any pleas for its life.

"Do you know how difficult it was to bring them all the way here alive, just so you could learn how to do something correctly? You're very ungrateful, and I don't know why I even bother trying to help you."

He thinks that two of the men had brown hair, that one was blonde, but had tried to avoid looking at their faces, and it's impossible to tell now. The fresh reek of bowels opened to the air pervades the room, stronger than any of the animals have been; Crona can't begin to wonder why that is, only that the smell makes his stomach ache.

"Crona," Medusa orders again. "Get. _Up."_

He tries, and his hands prickle with a saturating numbness. Weakly, he shakes his head as he hiccups through the tears.

"I can't! I can feel them inside me, right through Ragnarok! They're still moving and I don't know how to deal with that!"

Ragnarok shifts above him, shrugs, licks his lips with a gummy sound. "I don't know what you're crying about, stupid baby. These are some of the juiciest souls I've had since getting stuck with you."

"Be quiet, Ragnarok," says Medusa, calmly. Three vector arrows glide down, wrapping around Crona's arms and legs and pulling him to his feet like a marionette. His head swims.

When she smooths back his hair tenderly, he searches for the strength not to bury his face against her, but is unable to find it. For once, she doesn't throw him away. "I know, I know...it's a frightening thing, finding true power. But if you keep this up, one day you'll be a Kishin who never has to know fear again."

"I don't want it..I don't..."

"But you _will, _Crona." That tone that leaves him no disillusions of having any other choice. "Don't worry. Soon, it will become easier."

"How soon?"

"Well. That depends on you, now doesn't it?"


	7. 9

_9_

_

* * *

_

A year passes by, and he doesn't know how many souls that amounts to. Despite what Medusa says and Ragnarok gleefully confirms, it hasn't become easier. The screams that he forces from his mind during the day come back in the quiet of night, and he sees the look in their eyes.

He begins wetting the bed.

The first night it happened was the first time he froze under Ragnarok's abuse, which was unparalleled. Soon it becomes habitual. Night after night, he creeps into the bathroom like a bandit, fills the tub with the hottest water he can stand to touch, and pushes his sheets and sleeping attire to the bottom, where they billow up and swell like mushrooms. Night after night, he cleans himself until the cloth stings at his skin, and listens not only for the sound of feet in the hallway, but scales on the walls.

After two weeks, he has become accustomed to the ritual of damage control. Good at it, even. He's almost willing to believe that maybe, just maybe, Medusa will never know...which would in itself be worth the dark rings beneath his eyes, the itch of sleeping on wrung out sheets still spotted with soap.

But she always knows.

"I hope you realize what a disgusting child you've been," she tells him, standing in the doorway as he tries in vain to cover himself. "If you can't sleep in a bed like a civil person, you'll spend the night outside."

One glance at the cold mist outside the window has him curled at her feet. "Please, please Lady Medusa, don't send me out there, I promise I'll never do it again and I cleaned them really well and – "

"One more word and it will be three nights."

Knowing she'll make good on it, he ducks his head and whimpers. "Please! I can hear them screaming out there...they'll eat me..."

The upper portion of his arm is manacled in her grip then, and he knows it will do no good to scream, to struggle, to scrabble at the smooth floor with uselessly bare feet. "After what you've done? I hope they do."

He screams anyway.


	8. 10

_10_

_

* * *

_

"There is a Witch Mass tonight, and you will accompany me."

"Me? B-but why?"

"Why do you think? It's in case I have need of you. You're getting too old to be sitting around the castle while I'm out taking care of things for you."

"I thought only witches could go to the mass," he says, and wilts under the way she narrows her eyes.

"That's completely irrelevant. And in any case, Crona, I don't recall it being a request."

"Yes, Lady Medusa. Forgive me." Ringing his hands so hard the joints ache, he imagines himself stepping into the gates or doors or whatever it was that marked the gathering place, a thousand eyes turning on him before he was rent into black shreds. "What...what should I say if someone tries to talk to me?"

Although he's long since learned to avoid looking directly at her face, for a moment he could have sworn she was rolling her eyes.

"If you think that anyone would waste time speaking to a weak thing like you, you're more arrogant than I thought."


	9. 11

_11_

_

* * *

_

It still hasn't become easier.

One night in the Carpathian mountains, a church in Naples the next. A tiny coastal town in Peru. An old castle in Japan, opened up to the public. He wonders if the taste of a soul changes depending on where you are in the world, but decides it isn't worth the trouble to ask Ragnarok.

Welsh farm country tonight, where the grass is damp and the sound of distant sheep breaks the pre-dawn silence. There are lights on in several of the stone houses, and he hates it; the idea of someone looking out the window and seeing him there is frightening, makes his hand fly to his shoulder. An instinctive gesture to guard the heart.

The voice comes on little forked tongues, pricking the corners of his brain._ 'What are you waiting for, Crona?'_

"All the houses look the same," he whispers hoarsely back, afraid of drawing attention. "I don't know where to – "

_'They look nothing alike. You're making excuses, and I'm prepared to punish you for that.' _The madness begins to come over him, then, promising the warm heady rush of fearlessness that will come with giving in. The solace that will be found there. Because madness seldom lies, he knows that allowing it to take over would feel every bit as ameliorating as he's been promised, and yet –

_'If you continue to fight it, you know it will only be more difficult for you.' _

Silence.

_'Have it your way.'_

From somewhere in the village, a dog begins to bark. A door swings open off to his right, and he tells himself that she warned him. She wouldn't have warned him if she didn't care.

Crona swings.


	10. 12

_12 _

_

* * *

_

Crona is changing, and not in the great, sweeping, powerful way that Ragnarok does whenever he's consumed enough souls, nor the slow crawling way that reminds him he's growing taller (although he has grown much taller in the last few months, faster than he'd ever thought possible.) No, this is a new and terrible strangeness, stealing into him like a sickness and coming intermittently in quickenings, in waves, in small things he knew had not been there the week before.

He's growing thinner. What little fat had rounded his face and softened his arms seems to vanish overnight, leaving a fine layer of muscle laid down hard over the skeleton.

And then there are the dreams...

Finally, he goes to Medusa, trembling and clutching his arm and begging her to cure him, hoping with every fiber of his being that she would...after all, he couldn't become a Kishin if something was seriously wrong with him, right?

Ten minutes later he's lying on his bed in a fetal position, face buried as far into his pillow as he can get it, and doesn't stir when the ripple across his back heralds Ragnarok's emergence – even though this occurrence has become exponentially more painful with every year that passes.

"You totally had that coming, pipsqueak," he proclaims, close enough that Crona can feel his grin in the heat of his breath.

"Go away..."

The demon sword throws back his thick neck and laughs, adopting a high pitched mockery of Crona's voice. "'I think I might be sick, Lady Medusa! My voice won't stay the same and there's hair on my–"

"Stop it!"

"Lady Medusa, tell me what a wet dream is because I'm too much of an idiot to figure it out!"

"I didn't even say that! CUT IT OUT!"

He cringes as Ragnarok grinds his fist into the side of his head, still offering that thick chortle. "Alright, dipshit. You really want to know what's happening to your little twig body? I'll tell you, but I expect a 'thank you, Ragnarok' and first crack at your food for the next month."

Crona sits up, ignoring the demands on the rare off-chance his partner isn't serious. "She said never to bring it up again...that I had to ignore it or I'd get sicker and die." He squeals as a handful of hair is grabbed and wrenched hard, nearly enough to tear it from the roots.

"I heard what she said, stupid! Forget what Medusa said. Do you want to know or not?"

"Ahhhh! Fine, fine, I do! Stop pulling on me!" Mercifully, Ragnarok lets him go.

"Alright. Now sit up and listen, because I'm only explaining this once..."


	11. 13

__

13

* * *

It finally becomes easier.

The man claws his way across the pavement, nails catching and tearing as he attempts to make his way to the end of the alley. There's an orange light at the end, some run down fast food joint or all night laundry-mat. Distant, but just bright enough to obscure the name of the shop beneath it, and perhaps that's what drives him on. Choking on his own blood and saliva and broken teeth, he makes the mistake of calling out.

"Help! Oh God, help!"

Crona feels like laughing, although he can't remember what makes this all so funny. He steps down on the man's broken leg, just able to make out the sound of it shattering further over the screaming. Maybe that's what was funny.

"You look like you've got a tiny soul," he utters softly, not really caring if this man listens. "I don't think it will be very good for eating."

"Stop," groans the victim for what must be the fifth time. Or the tenth. Or the first...Crona hasn't been keeping very good count. "Please, stop. I've got two kids..."

"That's stupid. You can't say that. Remember, my blood is black." He raises Ragnarok, suddenly very tired of this. "You need to stay quiet."

It dies like an apple bursts, left beneath the tree for far too long and stepped on hard; messy and red and the soul that's left behind is, if not tiny, not worth all the work it took to corner and kill its container. He thinks Ragnarok is saying something about that, but right now it's all static in his ears, and he lets his head loll back, feeling the squirm between their bodies.

'_Crona,' _she commands, right there with him, right above the static. '_You need to get out of there this instant.'_

"Okaaaay..."

It's wonderful that way. Whenever he falters, whenever she tells him he can do it, that's the only time he really can. If she tells him, then it's like a switch going off and unlocking a door that opens wide, releasing all kinds of little furry things that rush to fill him up...and maybe, he thinks, that's what it feels like to have no fear. It's very nice of her to tell him when he shouldn't be afraid, really. So nice of her to make it happen.

Even when if all fades away and leaves him afraid again, that will be alright too. He'll just have to deal with it, because there's nothing else.

He knew he should have trusted her when she said it would become easy.


	12. 14

_14_

_

* * *

_

Her new form is diminutive, barefoot, and framed in soft edges of baby fat, with a voice like a tinkling bell. It's somewhat remarkable, then, that he can be as frightened of her as he is now. He would like to believe it's due to the new facade that accompanies her; rather than towering over him, she takes on the same threat carried by a drop of poison, a particle of virus, or a plague-baring flea.

"There must be a secret vault hidden somewhere in the school. You can start by finding it."

The truth is, he knows perfectly well what she's demanding.

"I'm counting on you, Crona," she says with a smile, and his throat clenches. Having given the command like she has no doubt he'll obey, suddenly she's counting on him.

But there_ is _something else, and Crona knows it now.

"W-wait!I have friends here...I can't betray the school..."

"You'll do it for your mother, won't you?"

Honey-laced. Gentle, pitiful. And even as another face dances on the back of his vision, even as he can hear her laughing, he knows Medusa has him.

For the briefest of moments, he remembers sitting on her lap, the smell of milk surrounding him. This time he cannot fall back on the illusion of a child thinking it's being given something sweet. He sees beyond the colorful vessel of what she offers him and knows that it holds only poison.

Despite all of this, he takes her words and drinks them in anyway.

He thought he'd run out of reasons to hate himself.


	13. 15

_15_

_

* * *

_

It may have been for the benefit of the students, training hard in 114 degree conditions. It could have been the simple act of seeing if it could be done. Or it could be that Shinigami, having one day grown tired of observing far off mountains, decided to take action before the memory of falling snow abandoned him completely. Regardless, it's not the fact that it snows in Death City, but the way nobody questions it that baffles Crona. How many times do you stare down the impossible before it becomes ordinary?

"It doesn't happen very often," Maka explains, standing at his shoulder, light jacket crinkling whenever she moves. Twin thermoses of tea warm their hands. "And never for more than a few days a year, usually around December and January. But professor Stein told me that one time, Shinigami-sama had it snow in the middle of summer."

Crona blinks. "He did?"

"Right." And then, leaning in closer in a rare moment of conspiracy, "And don't bring this up around Kid, because he'll deny it, but it was for his fourth birthday. The only thing he wanted was snow."

The idea that anyone would turn a desert city into a living snow globe for their child is not merely new to Crona, but unbelievable enough to border on the uncanny. He swirls his thermos, listens to the thick gulp of liquid within. "That was really nice of him."

There must have been some subtle inflection in his voice, some sign of it turning inward, because Maka changes the subject in that smooth fashion he admires in her.

"Hey! That reminds me. We've been friends for over a year, right?"

"R-right?"

"So," she says with a smile, tilting her head so he can see the snowflakes on her eyelashes. "I still don't know when your birthday is."

"Oh..." Crona takes a pull at the thermos, but does too quickly to let any liquid reach his tongue. He remembers the period of time spent recovering from Medusa's vector arrow, the catheterized wound in his torso. In a moment when his boredom had been high and morphine ration low, asking to see the medical file that Professor Stein frequently checked. Date of birth, location, blood type...over half of it had been blank spaces. Not applicable. "I don't know...I mean, I don't have one."

"Alright," Maka declares with a sweet simplicity that calls to mind herself in miniature, cheerfully erasing his line in the sand. "Then why not choose one?"

"What? Now?"

She laughs. "No, silly. Think it over first. Pick out any of the year and we'll celebrate it." And then, when he hesitates, "I promise we won't surprise you."

The realization of how well she knows him causes his face to heat up. "I don't know...it would be like lying, wouldn't it?"

"Of course not. Crona, the day you were born is only part of it. When people celebrate their birthdays, they're celebrating the fact that they're here. Aren't you happy you're here?"

A year ago, he knows exactly what he would have said to that. Maka knows it too.

So much can happen in a year.

"Yeah. I guess I am."

"Good." She takes his hand, gives it a brief, rough squeeze that makes his vision spin. "So am I."

By the time they get around to drinking, the snowflakes are slipping past the rims and melting in the tea, and Crona can't even feel them through the warmth that glides lazy circles in his stomach, just below his heart. To his surprise, it doesn't stay there, but radiates outward like the rays of the laughing sun are doing now, trying so hard to melt the snow.

Spicy, not sweet.

It hasn't stopped yet.

* * *

~END~


End file.
